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From head to tail, apart from that heavy kohl and some delicate brown shading to wings, tail, rump and abdomen, his plumage was an elegant blue-grey. The higher kokako-the male-swayed from a branch, his glossy-black “robber mask” directed skywards as he threw his spooky calls out over the forest. Elegant in grey, with a ninja’s black mask, dark legs and startling blue wattles, the raffish kokako is a sizable bird, intermediate in weight between a tui and a magpie. Now, eyepieces wiped free of grit and focus adjusted, she was finally ingest­ing some of that elusive avian magic first-hand. She’d heard me waffle non-stop about these birds since 1989, the year both she and a ground-breaking kokako research-by-management (RbM) pro­gramme, in which Kaharoa Forest was to play an integral part, had hatched. The morning light was exceptionally good, and Hazel’s vantage point, higher up the spur than mine, placed the two wattlebirds a little above head-height. She was helping out with the latest Kaharoa Kokako Trust census of territorial pairs in the Bay of Plenty forest of the same name. My daughter Hazel had had fleeting glimpses of wild kokako before, but nothing like this. The koka­ko-for that’s what they were-didn’t stop there, but bounded, squirrel-like, up to the topmost branches, where they recommenced their melodious duet. These arrows rapidly metamorphosed into crow-sized birds crashing into the head of a tawa just down from where we stood. This was tailed by a second: two dark arrows whizzing towards us across the intervening 100 m of airspace.

Then an observant eye picked out a sharp speck hurtling from a treetop on the far side of the gut. We kept our ears turned in the direction of Pa Ridge, but except for the swishing of some swaying leafage overhead, silence prevailed. This failed to elicit a response, however, so we lowered the recorder and rubbed our hands warm again. We hoisted our tape deck aloft on outstretched arm, “play” button depressed, and launched our own song skywards into the cool southerly. A pair was calling-due west across a deep gut­-from the vicinity of Pa Ridge. They were followed by a resonant harmony of high-pitched twangs, warbles and whines that raised the hackles on our necks.